TERRA: Beam Management for Outdoor mm-Wave Networks

TL;DR

TERRA is a beam management protocol for outdoor mm-Wave networks that leverages ground reflections to prevent outages during transient blockages and enables seamless handover without additional side information.

Contribution

The paper introduces TERRA, a novel beam management protocol that exploits ground reflections and facilitates outage prevention and handover in outdoor mm-Wave systems.

Findings

TERRA avoids outage during pedestrian blockages 84.5% of the time.

It maintains near-optimal signal strength during blockages.

Enables soft handover without side information.

Abstract

mm-Wave communication systems use narrow directional beams due to the spectrum's characteristic nature: high path and penetration losses. The mobile and the base station primarily employ beams in line of sight (LoS) direction and when needed in non-line of sight direction. Beam management protocol adapts the base station and mobile side beam direction during user mobility and to sustain the link during blockages. To avoid outage in transient pedestrian blockage of the LoS path, the mobile uses reflected or NLoS path available in indoor environments. Reflected paths can sustain time synchronization and maintain connectivity during temporary blockages. In outdoor environments, such reflections may not be available and prior work relied on dense base station deployment or co-ordinated multi-point access to address outage problem. Instead of dense and hence cost-intensive network deployments, we found experimentally that the mobile can capitalize on ground reflection. We developed TERRA protocol to effectively handle mobile side beam direction during transient blockage events. TERRA avoids outage during pedestrian blockages 84.5 $\%$ of the time in outdoor environments on concrete and gravel surfaces. TERRA also enables the mobile to perform a soft handover to a reserve neighbor base station in the event of a permanent blockage, without requiring any side information, unlike the existing works. Evaluations show that TERRA maintains received signal strength close to the optimal solution while keeping track of the neighbor base station.